Florence (part VI)

It was
doubtless too late or too soon for Florence to reach conclusions. The Republic,
distracted by civil war, rendered anaemic by tyranny, enervated by
intellectualism, by murder and love, had been passing through unexpected crises
from a spirited atheism,to a febrile mysticism, with merely an almost exhausted
energy to offer to the Italian soul. At the end of her history Florence still
retained her primitive language, and that primitive language was already dull
because it had been used to express too many sensations, and worn out, because
it had served too many Intelligences. The last of her great painters vainly
fled the harsh city in his attempt to break the diamond matrix in which she
imprisoned all hearts. Although he was ahead of his time, although he was, by
the extent and penetration of his analysis, the first of modern minds, he
remains a primitive at base, an old primitive very learned and disenchanted,
something like a germ of life already savoring of the cadaver.

The
Florentine line, that abstract and almost arbitrary line which da Vinci now
contrives to unite with volume until, as it merges into contour, it is confused
with the diminution of the light and the beginning of shadow—this line is
always felt to be present, pressing like a ring of metal upon skulls, faces,
shoulders, arms, and hands, forcing the form to bend under its embrace so as to
describe it in depth. One feels that, unlike Masaccio, who looked on life in
the mass and who sculptured it on his canvas with the force of his lights and
shadows, Leonardo took a section of life, followed it in its accidents, its
relations with surrounding life, and its course through space, and never lost
sight of the line that described the projections, the hollows, and the
undulations which were born of his pursuit of that line. One feels—and this is
why he remains a primitive despite his incalculable power—one feels that it is
through knowledge that he succeeds in surrounding his sculptured masses with
air and in sending back to a distance, in plane after plane, the blue
backgrounds of shattered rocks, of mountains, of sinuous roads, and slender
trees that live with an artificial life, like a theorem clinging to an emotion,
Gozzoli and Ghirlandajo, intuitively, through their sense of exact values, sent
their landscapes back to the horizon with more success than da Vinci did,
immersed as he was in perspective and mathematics. It is in his mind that the
relationships of the world live, even more so than in his senses, and much more
than in his heart.

With
this astounding man who founded or foresaw all the future sciences together, to
whom the arts of sculpture and painting seem to be no more than human
applications of the abstract ideas which he had drawn from the study of
geometry, perspective, mechanics, alchemy, geology, hydraulics, anatomy, and
botany, experimentation was of equal importance with the intuition that he
possessed to the highest degree; his intuition was of the kind that creates
life, the intuition that is inherent in every great artist, is sovereign to
such a degree that it first instigates and then halts the infinite number of
conscious or unconscious researches that prepared its explosion. He is perhaps
the only man in whom science and art were merged through their means of
expressing thought, since they tend to unite, in their common need, to
establish the continuity of the laws of nature in the domain of the mind.

Look at
his drawings of machines, his anatomical drawings, his drawings of muscles and
of flowers. They are the exact and minute representation of the machine, of the
muscles, of the flowers. They have also that mysterious tremor, that radiant
and secret expression which one sees in his strange, charming, or hard faces
that may mean so many things under the rain of the hair that curls to the bare
shoulders and to the bare breasts where the artist's line, with each succeeding
stroke, draws forth from beneath the skin the silent movement of the inner
life. The Italian artists of the fifteenth century had done well to explore the
nature of the cadaver, to study the course of the tendons, the projections of
the bones, the infinite flow of the nerves, the veins, and the arteries. Even
at the cost of a certain confusion, even at the cost of certain conflicts
between enthusiasm which creates and observation which disillusions, it was
necessary for humanity little by little, to draw from analysis the consciousness
of unity; it had to learn how to discover that the flame which glows in the
depths of human eyes sleeps in the heart of all forms, that it causes the trees
to tremble to the tips of their leaves, that it is in the wings of the birds,
the elytra of the insects, in the living muscles and in the dead bones, that it
passes from the vibrations of the atmosphere into the murmuring of the brooks
and even into the life of stones. On the day when Cellini uttered his artist's
admiration for the vertebrae and the bones of the pelvis, he spoke in the name
of two centuries which lived to demonstrate to us that all the forms of
knowledge may show us how to master and to increase the growth of our mind.
"The more one knows," said Leonardo, "the more one loves."

He knew.
In his eyes the form was no more than the symbol of a higher intellectual
reality whose fleeting direction and infinite character were translated by the
smile on a face or the gesture of a hand. It is a conception which, in order to
remain plastic, needs to be supported upon a formidable, narrow, and implacably
objective knowledge of the material of which life is made. It seems as if he
had understood everything. His "Bacchus" is the father of his
"Saint John the Baptist." The old dogmas and the new sentiments were,
with him, no longer in conflict. He accepted the world. He divined great
things. In the "Leda," where the wing of the swan followed with its
embrace the line like that of a lyre, which starts from the living arm, from
the warm, round breast to descend to the bare feet, there is, in the grass, a
broken egg from which children have just come forth and are picking flowers. He
perceived the common source and the eternal circle of things. He descended to
the profoundest depths of nature, with only his senses as the intermediary
between the outer universe regarding which they gradually reported to him and
the inner universe which controlled their agitation. And when he raised his
eyes to corroborate, from the faces and attitudes of men, the results of his
own meditation, he observed that their faces and their attitudes were a result
of the contact of their living mind with the living mind of the things that
surrounded them.

That is
the reason why, in his great picture of the "Last Supper," where the
inner drama creates its wave of life and twists and sculptures the forms like
trees in a hurricane, we find the loftiest work of active psychology in the
history of painting. He had the power to penetrate under every surface, to the
depths of every human skull, of living through its intimate tragedy, of
infusing the tragedy into the gestures which it dictated, and of uniting all
the movements of serenity and of revolt, of swift advance and of recoil, of
reserve and of abandon into a single movement of the mind. With him it is a
psychological arabesque that we get, transcribed by the form.

Da
Vinci could seize the same smile in the eyes and on the lips of all the beings
that came forth from his mind and insnare the movement of their fingers,
outstretched toward the same invisible point, as if to indicate to the future
the doubt which he felt within him. His painting, which is without mystery, is
the mystery of painting—one of the human mysteries. In him, all the science
amassed by the century flowers into poetry, and his science was composed of all
the poetry which his precursors have strewn about them. In an epoch when
Platonist idealism, which he ceaselessly combated, had misled intelligence, he
had the sense of real life which alone leads to the grandest abstractions. He
had the gentleness of wisdom and had acquired it at a time when the life of
impulse was loosed upon the world. Skeptical and disillusioned at a time when
minds susceptible of discontent were rushing back to the beliefs of the old
days, he attained, through his lofty reason, to the threshold of that confused
sentiment in which new religions are born, when humanity has rejected all the
dogmas on which its certitude reposed. And he, who claimed that there is no
science save that which may be translated into mathematical symbols, is the man
who translates what he knows into almost inscrutable plastic poems in which,
perhaps in spite of himself, intuition guides his hand.

There
is nothing in the world more vivifying and more discouraged, more ambiguous and
more intelligent, more defined and more infinite than his work. It Is the whole
of Florence, from Masaccio to Botticelli—its fiery analysis, its hasty
synthesis, its line penetrating to the heart and dissecting the brain; it is
everything that she suffered, everything that she hoped to give to us; and the
whole of it concentrates in this immense and secret soul which never opens to
us completely. Da Vinci embodied within him the torment of Florence and he did
not consent, any more than she did, to tell us everything that he had learned
therefrom.

It was
apart from da Vinci, apart from the Florence which he himself had abandoned and
at the hour of her decline, that the Renaissance was to find its clearest
expression. The historical role of the Italian republics, if one excepts
Venice, was finished. Exhausted by their internal struggles and by the
unbridled indulgence of the freedom of their passions, they had reached the end
of their capacity for effort. Their individualism, having exhausted the individual,
delivered them over to tyranny. They had lost the spring and the pride that
took the place of social bonds among them; they had lost the idea of the
dignity of existence and the sense of living righteousness. Already the prey of
the condottieri, they appealed now to
Spain, now to France, who, themselves having achieved unity, profited by it to
force themselves on Italy, whose people no longer believed in the heroism of
her destiny.

And yet, the confused sentiment which had guided
the Renaissance demanded consummation. If it had lost its early sweep, it
retained the speed that it had acquired. All it sought was favorable ground for
its unfolding. At Rome, the Pontificate offered a rather precarious shelter,
but the only one that remained in the storm, except Venice, where Italy mingled
with the Orient to infuse a magnificent life into the men who had grown up in
the wake of her triumphal movement. Florence, where Leonardo had passed no more
than his youth, obeyed until the end the singular destiny which renders her
such an incomparable focus of intellectual initiation, but where the mind seems
to be prohibited—perhaps because of the too-numerous excitements and problems
that besiege it—from achieving its accord with the elements of feeling and
sense which could bring about a definitive harmony. It was merely to light his
flame that Raphael came there; Michael Angelo, who was trained there, returns
only during times of crisis—once to defend the city, once to sculpture some
tombs. Those who remain Florentines, Albertinelli, Piero di Cosimo, Lorenzo di
Credi himself, so tender, so discreet, and so unusual, still belong in the line
of the primitives who had been intellectualized too quickly. And those among
her last painters who, after Leonardo and thanks to him, attain a larger
conception of form, who see it free of its early fetters, full and surrounded
by space—the gentle Fra Bartolommeo or the pure. Andrea del Sarto—are precisely
the men who have lost that restless ardor which characterized Tuscan art. With
them and after them, intelligence still remains the weapon of Florence, but it
is an intelligence that has mistaken its role through allowing sentiment to be
effaced; it is an intelligence that takes the means for the end and exhausts
itself in seeking the form outside of the inner drama that determines its
function. The formulas reached by the two masters of Rome have such a masculine
power of seduction that Tuscan art must needs attempt to employ them as the
frame for its weakening sentiment. The violence of Benvenuto, which he too
often expended in outward acts, the proud and sensual elegance of Giovanni da
Bologna, and the severity of Bronzino are not the right qualities for their
hands, which now handle tools with excessive ease. Florence, subjected and
fallen, can do no more than brood over her melancholy passion in the bitter
gardens where the shadow of the roses makes the water of the fountains tremble
at the foot of San Miniato.